E. Rosalie Li, M.A. • April 16, 2022

According to Russian Senator Konstantin Kosachev, after the beginning of the “special operation in Ukraine,” the Americans moved their top-secret bioweapons to Mongolia:

Hoaxlines Lab inquired about the claims that the Defense Threat Reduction Agency had relocated laboratories. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency Public Affairs replied:

The Russian state has offered no evidence for its repeated assertions related to false claims it made about laboratories.  Given Russia’s history of making false claims about the United States and biological weapons–Russia spread bioweapon disinformation about the US for the first time no later than 1949–we’re not taking Russia’s word on this.

To provide just one example of the harm Russia has caused with similar narratives, in 1982, after a long-term Soviet disinformation campaign, Pakistan denied visa renewals to US scientists. It ordered them to leave the country under threat of arrest. The scientists were there with the equivalent of over $9 billion in 2022 to research malaria control and prevent thousands of deaths in the region annually.

Why did Pakistan become so hostile toward the scientists, then? A Soviet disinformation campaign systematically spread rumors that the US was studying biological warfare for use in Cuba by experimenting on Pakistan’s people. The cost of this disinformation was every life we could have saved between 1982 and the early 2000s when Pakistan finally reduced malaria cases in the area.

The Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communications, which has published daily digests of Russia’s false claims, sees a more ominous meaning in the Kremlin’s game of musical bioweapons labs:

Claims that the US has moved laboratories from Ukraine to Mongolia are without evidence, and the Agency “has no current, active, or planned engagements with Mongolia.”

Soviet agents planted stories in newspapers around the world. In the 1980s, those stories were about HIV. This tradition of false claims has continued until today. An example is the false claims about Mongolia recently. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency Public Affairs told Hoaxlines:

Disinformation efforts continued after the fall of the Soviets in the early 1990s. While not all headlines reflect active measures, how they build upon one another over time is remarkable.

Besides the Kremlin’s history of spreading false bioweapons claims, the other inaccuracy concerns existing laboratories in Ukraine that were created in cooperation with the United States. Far from creating bioweapons, these laboratories were created to secure the Soviet Union’s biological weapons, which it developed in violation of a treaty the Soviets had signed.

The Soviet Union was the nation that created the bioweapons that Russia’s actions now threaten to unleash—however small that risk may be—by indiscriminately bombing and attacking Ukraine. Russia both created and now risks unleashing the threat.